Abstract

Habeas Corpus

The article discusses the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman whose husband fought for her right to die. Schiavo is a woman whose bulimic aversion to food was extreme enough to induce a massive systemic crisis that left her in what doctors describe as a "persistent vegetative state." Schiavo's case has turned into a messy public legislation of what was already a messy enough private tragedy capped off by the unprecedented bill to allow federal courts to review the state court decision. The bill that gave Terri Schiavo's parents a onetime individual right to sue in federal court would, if it became a general law, turn the medical disposition of other "innocent," "terrorized" passive bodies--think fetuses--over to the federal courts for final determination. Even as President George W. Bush was signing the bill to give Schiavo's parents standing to appeal in federal court, Texas hospitals were routinely yanking life support from those whom central casting too often depict not as "innocent" but as hangers-on, not only as incapacitated but as inconvenient, not as priceless but as greedy, resource-sucking welfare/Medicaid/Medicare profligates.